We consider the problem of the public release of statistical information about a population–explicitly accounting for the public-good properties of both data accuracy and privacy loss. We first consider the implications of adding the public-good component to recently published models of private data publication under differential privacy guarantees using a Vickery-Clark-Groves mechanism and a L...

BACKGROUND The public sector healthcare system in Saudi Arabia, essentially financed by oil revenues and 'free at the point of delivery', is coming under increasing strain due to escalating expenditure and an increasingly volatile oil market and is likely to be unsustainable in the medium to long term. OBJECTIVES This study examines how satisfied the Saudi people are with their public sector ...

BACKGROUND Health policy-making, a complex, multi-factorial process, requires balancing conflicting values. A salient issue is public support for policies; however, one reason for limited impact of public opinion may be misperceptions of policy makers regarding public opinion. For example, empirical research is scarce on perceptions of policy makers regarding public opinion on smoke-free public...

BACKGROUND Patient and public preferences for therapeutic outcomes or medical technologies are often elicited, and discordance between the two is frequently reported. OBJECTIVE Our main objective was to compare patient and public preferences for treatment attributes in Parkinson's disease (PD). METHODS A representative sample from Dutch PD patients and the general public were invited to com...

T he 2008 annual Math Awareness Month theme features the unusual combination of “Mathematics and Voting”. The importance of voting is obvious; indeed, with the United States election season hard upon us, discussions about voting are seemingly nonstop. More generally, on almost any day of any year the news media reports on some consequential election going on somewhere in the world. But what doe...

This article presents the results of a survey carried out at two space outreach events in the UK aimed at characterising "the public for space exploration" and measuring public support for space exploration. Attitude towards space exploration and policy preferences were used as measures of public support. The sample involved 744 respondents and was mainly composed of adults between 25 and 45 ye...

Inviting the public to be part of the decision making process in environmental management has been a major objective in European and American environmental policy arenas. As one prominent example, the US-National Academy of Sciences encourages environmental protection agencies to foster citizen participation and public involvement for making environmental policy making and risk management more ...

We explore the quality of political representation of constituents’ preferences for budgetary decisions within a quasi-experimental setting. In the Swiss referendum process, constituents reveal their preferences for budgetary proposals which are either expected to increase or decrease public debts. We match individual politicians’ voting behavior on debt increasing and debt reducing legislative...

The purpose of this note is to compute the probability of logrolling for three different probabilistic cultures. The primary finding is that the restriction of preferences to be in accord with the condition of separable preferences creates enough additional structure among voters’ preference rankings to create an increase in the likelihood that a Condorcet winner will exist with both IC and IAC...